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Researchers at Simon Fraser University in Canada, found non-Christians feel less self-assured and have fewer positive feelings if a Christmas tree was in the room.
The bewildering feature of political correctness is the mandated replacement of formerly unexceptionable terms by new ones: "Negro" by "black" by "African-American"; "Spanish-American" by "Hispanic" by "Latino"; "slum" by "ghetto" by "inner city" by, according to the Los Angel
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THE Los Angeles Times' new "Guidelines on Racial and Ethnic Identification," for its writers and editors, bans or restricts some 150 words and phrases such as "birth defect," "Chinese fire drill," "crazy," "dark continent," "stepchild," "WASP" and "to welsh."
Defying such politically correct sensibilities, the Economist allows the use of variants of "he" for both males and females (as in "everyone should watch his language"), and "crippled" for disabled people.
One side says that language insidiously shapes attitudes and that vigilance against subtle offense is necessary to eliminate prejudice. The other bristles at legislating language, seeing a corrosion of clarity and expressiveness at best, and thought control at worst, changing the way reporters render events and opinions. -
First, words are not thoughts. Despite the appeal of the theory that language determines thought, no cognitive scientist believes it.
People coin new words, grapple for le mot juste, translate from other languages and ridicule or defend PC terms.
None of this would be possible if the ideas expressed by words were identical to the words themselves. - 4 more annotation(s)...
In companies that advertised job openings, good-looking females (as judged by a panel we assembled) received 6% fewer callbacks than plain-looking females and 23% fewer than women without pictures. The beauty "penalty" was much smaller and less significant when it came to employment agencies, perhaps because the women screening CVs wouldn't have had to work side-by-side with the candidates.
In both the hiring companies and the agencies, screeners reacted favorably to pictures of attractive-looking men, giving these candidates significantly more callbacks than plain-looking men and males who didn't attach photos. This male beauty premium did not come as a surprise in light of the large body of psychological research showing that attractive people are generally viewed positively along numerous dimensions. They're believed to be happier, healthier, more intelligent, luckier in marriage, and so on. Thus the responses to the CV photos of attractive women really stand out and tell us a lot about the screeners' biases.
when men express a ‘fear’ of homosexuality it is often to me, not motivated by hatred of the ‘other’ – gay people – but rather a fear of their own latent homosexual tendencies. I tend to use the word ‘homo-anxiety’ rather than ‘homophobia’ to describe this phenomenon.
the typical four-year-old boy does not control his diet or exercise; his nutrition and activity are usually closely supervised. He cannot nip out for a burger any more than a goldfish can. His obesity partly reflects his mother’s lifestyle when he was in utero, and his family’s lifestyle after he was born. He has had obesity thrust upon him, and with it a dysfunctional metabolism, insulin resistance, chronic illness, and a shortened life. He already has enough problems without society ganging up on him for being a fatso.
Yet researchers have found that children as young as six years old, even those who are overweight themselves, use words like “lazy,” “stupid,” “cheats,” “liars,” “sloppy,” “naughty,” “mean,” and “ugly” to describe their obese peers. Similarly, recent studies of college students show that respondents rate obese individuals as less attractive potential partners than embezzlers, cocaine users, and shoplifters.
Obese people often share society’s low opinion of them. Of one group whose members lost weight after surgery, 42% claimed that they would rather go blind than regain it. Most would rather lose a leg, and all would prefer deafness, dyslexia, diabetes, severe heart disease, or acne.
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The obese were not always considered monsters. On the contrary, until recently they were often revered. Historically, in most societies, obesity implied wealth and health – expensive epicurean habits and no tuberculosis, cholera, or other wasting illnesses. Only now, when fat people outnumber the lean by two to one in many countries, has obesity become the last acceptable target of public discrimination.
Contemporary research has shown that a significant portion of gay men have traits, interests, occupations, and behaviors that are consistent with the stereotype of gay men as effeminate, androgynous, or unmasculine. A great number of gay men exhibit gender nonconformity during childhood; most, however, "defeminize" during adolescence, possibly in response to stigmatization and society's gender-role prescription. Only a relatively small percentage of gay men continue to be gender-nonconforming in their adulthood, often at a price, as they also tend to have lower psychological well-being. Although gay culture historically appreciated camp and drag, which subvert the gender-based power hierarchy and celebrate gender nonconformity, anti-effeminacy prejudice is widespread among gay men. Ironically, gender-nonconforming gay men may suffer from discrimination not only from society at large, but from other gay men, who are most likely to have experienced stigmatization and may have been effeminate earlier in their lives. Drawing from anecdotes and findings from various sources, this article suggests that beyond many gay men's erotic preference for masculinity lies contempt and hostility toward effeminacy and effeminate men on sociopolitical and personal levels. Two correlates of gay men's anti-effeminacy attitudes are proposed: (a) hegemonic masculinity ideology, or the degree to which one subscribes to the value system in which masculinity is an asset, and men and masculinity are considered superior to women and femininity; and (b) masculinity consciousness, or the saliency of masculinity in one's self-monitoring, public self-consciousness, and self-concept. These two variables are hypothesized to interact with gay men's self-perceived masculinity-femininity and their history of defeminization in predicting attitudes toward effeminacy. Research is underway to measure levels of anti-effeminacy attitudes and explore hypothesized correlates.
Critics of the bill say it unfairly singles out the Chinese community. The bill only restricts the sale of shark fins, which are used almost exclusively in Chinese cuisine. The bill does not apply to other shark products like oil or meat.
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Critics of the bill say it unfairly singles out the Chinese community. The bill only restricts the sale of shark fins, which are used almost exclusively in Chinese cuisine. The bill does not apply to other shark products like oil or meat.
"I think for the ban to be culturally blind it has to ban all the products that have to do with sharks, shark meat, shark oil," says Vicky Ching, the owner of Ming's Restaurant in San Francisco.
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Not all lawmakers support the legislation. Assemblymember Mike Eng said there was a lack of dialogue with the Chinese community before the bill was introduced.
"Give our community the opportunity to realize how bad it is to request shark's fin at a restaurant. That has not been done. Instead what we have is legislation that's been, that's going to be forced down our throats," Eng said. "I don't think that's reasonable, I don't think that's going to lead to better conduct and I don't think that's necessary."
A former student at the LSE Gender Institute, Martin claims he had the misfortune of being subject to a torrent of anti-male discrimination during his (very brief) time there, and has cited the Gender Equality Duty to support his case. The irony of attacking feminists by invoking a piece of legislation whose existence is largely down to the energy and commitment of feminist campaigners scarcely needs pointing out.
Martin alleges that the course material he studied during his six weeks at the LSE was systematically anti-male overlooked men's issues, and ignored any research that contested a "women good, men bad" line of reasoning. Furthermore, Martin claims that the Gender Institute drummed into the students, with quasi-religious fervour, a simplistic view of women as victims and men as perpetrators. If his experience is anything to go by, any self-respecting male should steer well clear of such institutionalised misandry.
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A problem with gendered studies is the appalling level of scholarship. It's not so much an area of study and research as it is political advocacy.
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The irony of attacking feminists by invoking a piece of legislation whose existence is largely down to the energy and commitment of feminist campaigners scarcely needs pointing out.
That's life. People use Freedom of Speech to attack Freedom of Speech.You just have to put up with it.
The reality about "offensive language" is that there's a euphemism treadmill. The PC terms we come up with today will be considered offensive tomorrow. "Idiot" and "retarded" used to be medical terms.
How long will the list of words and terms that we should avoid using be, if everything that could potentially offend someone is avoided?
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It's not really about double standards here, but rather people deciding to decree on a semi-arbitrary basis what is "offensive" and imposing standards on others.
Singaporean Chinese were discriminating against Indians and complaining about the smell of their food long before one million mainlanders flooded the country
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Yeah sure, mainland Chinese are bigoted. They make a big show of belonging to an older culture and thus are “superior” to everyone else. They have paler skins than the south-east Asian Chinese and make a big deal out of that as well. (Malaysian Chinese we’ve met have a particular antipathy towards mainland Chinese, calling them arrogant peasants.) Mainlanders also have singularly undeveloped senses of humour. (We know, we’ve worked with a few of them.)
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we also had to confirm that we weren’t mainland Chinese when we were apartment hunting. You see, the Indians may stink out the place (snort), but those same agents told us that mainlanders trash apartments. If you can see a bigger problem looming beneath this little feel-good band-aid, you’d be right.
“Having privilege isn’t something you can usually change, but that’s okay, because it’s not something you should be ashamed of, or feel bad about. Being told you have privilege, or that you’re privileged, isn’t an insult. It’s a reminder! The key to privilege isn’t worrying about having it, or trying to deny it, or apologize for it, or get rid of it. It’s just paying attention to it, and knowing what it means for you and the people around you. Having privilege is like having big feet. No one hates you for having big feet! They just want you to remember to be careful where you walk.”
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Saying that telling someone they are privileged ‘isn’t an insult’ is a bare-faced lie.
I have seen so many feminists, gay and queer and trans activists use the single word ‘privilege’ to dismiss an individual and their arguments I have lost count.
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‘Privilege’ seems to be a way of at once blaming individuals for complex situations, and then also maintaining a ‘group’ identity of those who are not privileged.
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there are two quite distinct ideas that fly under the banner of "religious freedom." The first is that people have the right to practice a faith, consistent with the rights of everyone else. We think this is vital and unassailable. However, as we will contend, it is misleading to label this idea "religious freedom." The second idea is that religions deserve some special accommodations under the law that are not available to comparable secular institutions or commitments.
Traditionally cherished and unquestioned though it may be, this latter notion of religious freedom is philosophically unsound, legally incoherent, and morally indefensible. To make real progress in the conversation about church and state, we must give it up.
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there are two quite distinct ideas that fly under the banner of "religious freedom." The first is that people have the right to practice a faith, consistent with the rights of everyone else. We think this is vital and unassailable. However, as we will contend, it is misleading to label this idea "religious freedom." The second idea is that religions deserve some special accommodations under the law that are not available to comparable secular institutions or commitments.
Traditionally cherished and unquestioned though it may be, this latter notion of religious freedom is philosophically unsound, legally incoherent, and morally indefensible. To make real progress in the conversation about church and state, we must give it up. -
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The religion clauses of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution were perhaps the boldest and most novel assertions of the American experiment. Their formulators, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, hoped "to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries," as Madison put it. Neither man foresaw that the Free Exercise clause would come to mean what it does today: the "accommodation" of religion by granting practitioners a presumptive right to violate otherwise valid laws.
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So, what gender is science? In short, it depends. When occupations or fields are segregated by sex, most people suspect it reflects fields’ inherently masculine or feminine task content. But this presumption is belied by substantial cross-national variability in the gender composition of fields, STEM in particular. Moreover, this variability follows surprising patterns. Whereas most people would expect to find many more female engineers in the U.S. and Sweden than in Columbia and Bulgaria, new data suggest that precisely the opposite is true.
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In labor markets, one well-known cause of sex segregation is discrimination, which can occur openly and directly or through more subtle, systemic processes
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Sociologists and economists have documented this cognitive bias and “statistical discrimination” through diverse experiments. It turns out that people’s beliefs about men’s and women’s different natures lead them to assess task performance accordingly, even in the absence of any actual performance differences.
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The fight over legalizing gay marriage in New York is getting ugly online as the Republican Senate plans to finally consider the bill in closed-door conference Thursday.
The leader of the state Senate, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan and at least one other lawmaker have been besieged by offensive posts, forcing them to curtail comments.
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"Our unofficial Facebook policy is not to automatically delete comments that disagree with us, but when the comments come into untruths or uncharitable, then we have to delete them," Poust said. "And when it really becomes abusive we have to ban them."
According to the group, one Facebook post stated: "Eventually your kind of 'religion' will be extinguished from the memory of mankind forever, because this sort of interference in the lives of people you only wish to harm. You have NO MORAL AUTHORITY any longer because of your evil pedophilia."
Another said the Catholic church only approves of marriages "that produce altar boys to be molested."
The group deleted both.
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"The tension has really reached a fever pitch for some people. ... I'm sure there are certain unstable members of both sides who are prone to excess," Poust said.
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same goal of demographic diversity does not apply to the competitive teams or the glee club or orchestra for that matter because those groups have a much more narrowly defined task. It’s that difference in purpose, rather than the difference in which race gets helped, that underlies the responses in the video. Take those same liberal students who support admissions policies that bring more blacks to campus; ask then if they would also support race-based preferences to get more blacks into crew, the glee club, or the chess team. I’m sure they would say no. As in the actual video, they would probably be unable to explain why giving preference to African Americans is acceptable in admissions but not activities.
They’ll say that the two are different, even though they can’t immediately explain why. Does that make them hypocrites, natural or un-?
The next time someone shoves a microphone in your face and asks for a justification for some distinction you make, smile at the camera and say, “As Michael Polany wrote in The Tacit Dimension, ‘we know more than we can tell,’ an insight that Richard Nisbett later developed with much social science evidence in his book Knowing More than We Can Tell.”
no other minority has the luxury of being able to decide whether or not they inform other people about what makes them a minority. (“In a tearful interview yesterday Barack Obama revealed that he is mixed race,” is not a sentence you’ll ever read.) Yet no other group faces the kind of early isolation that we do. Jewish people aren’t thrown out by their parents. Asian people don’t grow up hearing their dad say “paki”. But for gay teenagers, often bullied at school and subjected to homophobia at home, their only access to other people from their community is through the media.
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When people in the closet say, “Why should I tell anyone? It’s no one’s business,” they are absolutely right – it isn’t. When others say that it should be everyone’s individual choice whether or not they come out, they too are absolutely right. But we don’t live in hermetically sealed vacuums. We live in a world drenched in a hatred that affects millions of powerless people. The unavoidable, uncomfortable truth for closeted celebrities is that until gay people enjoy the same levels of happiness, success and safety as everyone else, staying silent helps to keep us from achieving those same levels.
A Dutch court has acquitted the rightwing politician Geert Wilders of hate charges, saying his claims that Islam is violent by nature, and his calls for a ban on Muslim immigration and the Qur'an, always fell within the bounds of legitimate political debate even if they were offensive to many Muslims. The court found his rhetoric was "on the edge of what is legally permissible". Wilders, the leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), the third-largest political party in the Netherlands, argued his statements represented the views of millions of voters and that the charges were politically motivated.
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